Diethylzinc is known as an extremely useful industrial material, for example as a catalyst for polymerizing a polyethylene oxide and a polypropylene oxide, an organic synthetic reaction reagent when manufacturing intermediates such as medicine or functional materials.
Also recently, as a method to form a zinc oxide film, a technique referred to as the MOCVD (Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition) method is examined. In this method of approach, diethylzinc is used as a raw material and steam is used as an oxidizer.
A zinc oxide film provided by the MOCVD method has wide applications, that is, the zinc oxide film is used as a buffer layer of a CIGS solar battery, a transparent conductive film, an electrode membrane of a dye sensitization solar battery, a middle layer of a thin film Si solar battery, various function films in a solar battery such as a transparent conductive film, a photocatalyst film, a film intercepting ultraviolet rays, a film reflecting infrared rays, various function films such as antistatic films, a compound semiconductor light emitting element and electronic devices such as thin-film transistors.
It is known (e.g., non-patent document 1) that the diethylzinc gradually resolves by adding heat and precipitates zinc metal particles. Therefore, in the handling of the diethylzinc, there are problems of a fall off in product purity, pollution of a storage container and constriction of a production facility pipe. These are caused by the deposition of zinc metal particles formed by thermolysis.
As a method to solve the problems due to the deposition of the zinc metal precipitated by the above described thermolysis, a method is known which stabilizes the diethylzinc composition by adding compounds such as anthracene, acenaphthene, acenaphthylene (e.g., patent document (1)-(3)).